


And the greatest of these

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Courfeyrac isn't in this fic, Gen, I don't know how that happened, I love you Brick, Marius and Cosette have kidlets, blood love and rhetoric deliberately misunderstood, completely saccharine, everyone constantly gardening, if there's one thing Hugo loves it's people simplifying his work, sorry Hugo, sorry Stoppard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the kinkmeme, prompt is "blood, love and rhetoric, either concurrent or consecutive." Prompt elaboration is: "Les Mis is all blood, love, and rhetoric, you see."</p><p>So I tried to do the compulsory elements with absolutely zero Stoppard. And with Marius and Cosette with kidz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the greatest of these

**Author's Note:**

> WELP okay I've never written Marius and Cosette before, or futurefic, so maybe it was time? Also this a a BOLD ACTION of not posting as anon because if I start enforcing quality standards on what is anon and what is not I will have no fic left.

They lived in Vernon,  _entre cour et jardin_ , and in spring there was every kind of flower. When winter began to break, Marius’ affection for these flowers roused -- he put on a hat with a brim, and tied on a smock, and went outside every morning and every evening to give them water or monitor their progress.

“We must cultivate our gardens,” he would say, with a wink, to Cosette.

And so one day at the outset of spring, he returned from his practice determined to see his garden, and as it happened his young daughter had wanted his attention in the same moment to look at a rabbit she had spent the day drawing from life.

“My dear Jeanne,” he said, moving the child out of the way as he put on his hat. “I will be delighted to look at your rabbit in half an hour,” so saying he disappeared to the garden and Jeanne began to cry.

Cosette asked the nurse to give them a moment, and she sat down on the floor next to her daughter, gently removing the drawing to a safer place.

“Why are you crying, my little lark?”

“Papa loves his flowers,” said Jeanne. “I wish I were a flower too, or that all the flowers would die, so he would like me.”

“You’re being very silly,” said Cosette. “He just wanted to get the last of the light. But between ourselves, he can be very stubborn about that garden, which will bloom even untended. The secret is, his father kept flowers here in Vernon -- and a spectacular array of them, once upon a time.”

Tears rolled down the girl’s face, and Cosette put a finger on her nose. “I see you are not convinced. I’ll not talk down to you, my love, but I will tell you that nothing -- especially not flowers -- can be stronger than love for your own blood. Do you know what that means?”

Jeanne shook her head.

“Blood is what makes two people family to each other. You and I share it. And you and your papa share it. Shall I tell you a story?”

“Yes,” said Jeanne, and when she realized her face was still wet she dried her tears. “Please.”

“Once there was a young girl from Montreuil-sur-Mer. She left one day to go to Paris, and when she was older she had a little daughter, whom she loved more than anything in the world. She would take her to see all the great sights in Paris. The Luxembourg Gardens, the public fairs, the performers on the Pont Neuf, but they were poor. So one day she returned home, to Montreuil, to find a job. For she had given everything she owned to her child; her dresses, her food, her bonnets, and happily, but she did not have much. So they went to Montreuil together.”

“And did she find work to buy dresses of her own?”

“She worked very hard, but it was not enough. The factory would not let her child live with her. So she lived with another family, and her mother sent money, for medicine, for food, for everyday living. But that too ran out.”

“So what happened?”

“She had her hair cut off, and she sold it to a wig-maker,” said Cosette, with a pause that made it reverent. She had repeated the story to herself so many times --  _Fantine, her father had said, fall on your knees when you pronounce it_  -- and it was not until she had her own daughter that she grasped the story with sympathy and completeness.

Jeanne gasped. “She sold her hair!”

“That is not all. Next, she went to a man who makes dentures, and he pulled out some of her teeth and paid her for them.”

Jeanne was wide-eyed.

“And I would not hesitate a moment to do the same for you,” Cosette continued, wondering if Fantine listened to her now and was proud. “I would give everything that is mine, down to my hair and my teeth, for you, and Papa would too. If you needed it, we would not waste a minute.”

“No,” said Jeanne. “I would forbid you. I wouldn’t let you, no matter what, I wouldn’t let you or Papa give up anything, not your hair, or your teeth.”

“Come sit on my lap, my love. You are clever, like your papa,” said Cosette, smiling at her daughter, proud of her. “So do you see, we are each other’s blood. We cannot permit each other to suffer.”

 

* * *

 

Georges came back from Louis-le-Grand for holidays, and in the character of all boys who were beginning to love learning, he was very pompous. His sister ignored him, and when he was home during Easter she was sitting on a bench in her father’s garden, where the wisteria vines were beginning very cautiously to bud.

As a child, she had hated flowers. As a young woman, she adored them. She had her own brimmed hat and apron, and in the garden she shared jokes with her father. Cosette thought of herself at that age, within the convent walls, stealing time with her father as he pruned the vines and pulled weeds.

Jean Valjean and Georges Pontmercy were both gardeners, she thought, and now their children turned their faces to the sun.

Within an hour of Georges’ arrival at Vernon, he and Jeanne became exhausted of each other and she pulled on her hat as she stormed outside to find Marius staring very intensely at some of the wisteria leaves.

“Georges is an imbecile,” said Jeanne, and she sat with girlish disappointment on the bench, her feet flat in front of her, frowning like a schoolmaster.

“I will be disappointed if you are correct,” said Marius. “Still. What is your evidence?”

“He said I was sunburnt and stooped like an old tree-pruner, and I said he looked like rabbit with his front teeth, and that doesn’t our father always say, we must cultivate our gardens?”

Marius raised his eyebrows. “Well, in the first place he’s wrong. But you were also unkind. How did he reply?”

“He said that Voltaire is only rhetoric, and rhetoric is empty, and so my head must be empty as well.”

Marius sat next to her on the bench, and she scooted over to let him.

“My love,” he said. “Georges will have many more opinions, more vexing even than that, and we must learn to be patient with him. But the truth is that rhetoric moves us, no matter what we say about ordering our loves, it is only when we hear them spoken about that we rise to defend them, or pursue them, or deny them.”

“I wonder,” said Jeanne. “If you are going to tell me a story the begins with ‘in my student days.’”

“In my student days,” said Marius, and put a finger on her nose the way Cosette did. She laughed. “In my student days, my friends were very erudite. They would spend nights in a variety of  _arguendo_  roles. They talked endlessly, and none of it was empty. They talked about the future, about education, about virtues, and citizenship.”

Jeanne frowned. “Are they in government, now? They sound very political.”

“No,” said Marius, and he took off his hat, looking at it for a minute. The minute stretched, and he put his hat on his knee. “No, they are not in the government now. But you’re right. All of it was very political, but directed to something better. The muscles of the earthly city are practicalities: taxes, law and order, trade, lawyers like me, bridges and public buildings. But the beating heart of it is philosophy, how can we live our lives to exalt goodness in ourselves and in others. This is how we understood the word ‘political,’ when we spoke of it we spoke of its anatomy.”

“I think I understand,” said Jeanne. “I think that the idea is beautiful.”

“There you are,” said Marius. “A simple rhetorical device, the muscles that move a man forward and the heart that drives his passions, and do you feel deceived, or that your time has been wasted with hollow noise?”

His daughter shook her head. “Not at all. It helped me to understand.”

“As it helped me to understand. One of my dear friends used to say, the good must be innocent, and now that I am a father I know it must be so. For better or for worse, rhetoric colors how we speak to our friends, our children, to ourselves and to God. There is nothing we do not understand that we have achieved without it.”

“You’re lucky to have such smart friends,” she said. “Do any of them live here in Vernon?”

“No,” said Marius. “Though I wish they did -- smart men love gardens, and my friends would be proud to see how pretty we have made this one.”

 

* * *

 

The day before Jeanne’s wedding to a young solicitor in her father’s practice, Cosette gave her the gift of one of the silver candlesticks.   
  
“One of Jean Valjean’s candlesticks,” said Jeanne, and she ran her fingers along the work at the base.  
  
“The other one will go to Georges, one day,” said Cosette, and they shared a smile that wondered if Georges would  _ever_  take his nose out of a book longer enough to marry. It was a joke they shared, and it made Jeanne sad that she would no longer see her mother for supper every day.  
  
“To remind us to love one another, and God,” said Jeanne, with a smile. She had heard it so often as a child. And now the candlestick was in her hands -- it matched with nothing, but she would keep it in her bedroom, thinking of when she was so small she had to turn her neck up to the pair of them, given to a man named Jean Valjean by a kind bishop, once upon a time.   
  
“Yes,” said Cosette. “Jean Valjean did not think he could love anyone, especially God -- for nineteen years, more than you have been alive, he was a criminal serving a sentence of forced labor. He was ignorant and full of hatred, and one night he stole a sack of silver from a kind old bishop in a town called Digne.”  
  
Jeanne stared at the candlestick in her hands. “I though it was a gift -- a criminal! -- Mama! What sort of joke?”  
  
Cosette interrupted her, smiling as if Jeanne’s reaction was what she had sought. “I did not finish. He was caught running away from the bishop’s home, and when the gendarmes dragged him back the bishop was very surprised to see his silver once again! Now instead of telling the gendarmes that they had done well and he was grateful, he only smiled and greeted the man who stole from him, saying, I am happy to see you once more, but you have forgotten these candlesticks! They are worth two hundred francs at least.”  
  
“An act of charity,” said Jeanne.  
  
“And then the bishop took Jean Valjean inside to pack the silver well, and he said, do not forget your promise to use this silver to make your way honestly in the world. And then he said, you no longer belong to evil. The candlesticks in his knapsack were those that you saw so often in our home. Jean Valjean, the same Jean who is your grandpa, died the very best of men, and though he worked hard throughout his life to be loving and good, the simple truth is that when he had fallen someone took his hand and helped him to his feet.”  
  
Jeanne looked at the heavy silver. Her mother and father had lived such lives before they came to Vernon together to be happy -- her grandfather, always spoken of with such warmth that he almost felt like a part of her life -- had served nineteen years of forced labor, and his daughter Cosette loved him more for it.   
  
She wondered what she would say if she gave her own daughter the gift of a silver candlestick, on some summer evening so far in the future.   
  
“I shall keep it in my own bedroom,” she said, and hugged each of her parents. After tomorrow she would have a husband -- after tomorrow she would see her father’s garden only on visits.  
  
“I’m happy that you’re getting married tomorrow,” said her father, putting his pipe together with one brow cocked at her to make her laugh. “I’m at a loss to teach you anything else, my dear, so I am superfluous. You can cause a rose to bloom, you can cause one of the most hopeless solicitors in my office to thrive in an attempt to impress me. You know that men are animated by blood, by love, and by rhetoric.”  
  
“And that the greatest of these is love,” said her mother.   
  
“I thought that was faith, hope, and love?” Jeanne replied.   
  
“The difference,” said Marius, with a wink, “is rhetorical.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Woo naming kids after dads, sorry Fantine it was a very tough call.
> 
> 2\. Obviously Marius grows up into an enormous nerd who is like HELLO EVERYONE GET OUT OF BED THERE IS A YELLOW TULIP CALL THE MAYOR -- WAIT NO FALSE ALARM -- NO GET BACK UP IT'S REAL IT'S A YELLOW TULIP
> 
> 3\. I imagine JVJ left Cosette an extremely comprehensive note. Possibly written by a friend of his named Victor Hugo. Possibly it's a novel. Uhm. I? (twirls cape, exits left)
> 
> 4\. Wait did I just write an entire fic without Courfeyrac? It -- yes I just double-checked he's not here. But. Okay. 
> 
>  
> 
> ._.


End file.
